Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 111: Mike Rogers, CRO at Noetic Cyber, breaks down why Ionic Security was not a financial success

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111: Mike Rogers, CRO at Noetic Cyber, breaks down why Ionic Security was not a financial success · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

0:42
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to episode 111 of the Sales Blue Bird podcast, which exists because at B2B startups it's hard to get go-to-market fit, grow revenue, and scale the sales team.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird provides tips, tricks, experiences, and examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who've been doing this for many years and at many different companies.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: We want your path to go to market fit and beyond the less rocky so that you can grow sales faster.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and welcome to episode 111.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Our guest is Mike Rogers, the CRO at Noethics Cyber.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: Mike, welcome to the podcast.
1:22
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Andrew.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: Happy to be here.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this discussion.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to cover some good grinds, some common experiences that we had a few years ago, and see what we can uh learn from that and tell the listeners about it.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: But before we get into it, a couple of things.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: I want to hear from our listeners.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: There must be ideas, questions, barriers, bottlenecks, challenges you're facing that uh it would be good to have covered on the podcast, either just by myself or me and one of my guests to cover some topics that are top of mind for you.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: If that's the case, email me directly at andrew at unstoppable.do.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: That's unstoppable.do.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: It's do at the end, not dot com.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Or if you're like me and you just prefer to record a video or an audio because it's quicker that way, you can go to zipmessage.com forward slash unstoppable.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: That's zipmessage.com forward slash unstoppable.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: So please submit your your questions, ideas, or whatever stuff of mind for you.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: So Mike, back to you.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: I've got six questions to get to know the real Mike Rogers.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: Uh these are the first few are either ors, and the set the last two are just simple answers.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: Not the time for debate, discussion, it depends, or both.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: All right.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: So go with these.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: First one dive bar or cocktail bar?
2:44
SPEAKER_00: Dive bar.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: Suite of the four seasons or cabin in the woods?
2:48
SPEAKER_01: Cabin in the woods.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: Tripped out Jeep or German car with all the gadgets?
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Tripped out Jeep, absolutely.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: Beach or mountains.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Beach.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: They say home is where the heart is.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: Where is home for you?
3:01
SPEAKER_00: Utah.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: And how did you first make money as a kid?
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Paper route.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: So uh paper route then to uh fast food chain.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: How how old were you when you started your paper route?
3:12
SPEAKER_01: Uh I was in my early teens, probably 11 or 12.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: And that was back home in Utah?
3:18
SPEAKER_00: I was back in Utah.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: Cool.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: All right.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Let's go to your LinkedIn profile.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: So when I look at this, I see someone who spent virtually all your career in cybersecurity, going all the way back to I guess PGP or even fast forward before that, right?
3:39
SPEAKER_00: Right.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: And you started off as a, I would imagine, a junior seller in 2003 at PGP.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
3:46
SPEAKER_01: I did.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't on the inside sales team.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: I was an account manager, so uh more enterprise sales.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: But yes, yeah.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: I I I started basically as an account manager, and my region was the the Rockies and Tola, so Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: So from that to director of sales, and then you moved to RSA in the Archer division of RSA, to then Ionic, which we'll come back to, where you were the head of sales and and customer success worldwide for that.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: In Corta, head of sales, Veronis, and now you're the chief revenue officer at Noetic Cyber.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you quickly just tell us what Noetic does, just so we get some uh frame of reference?
4:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so Noetic Cyber really kind of turns the light bulb on for CISOs and information security teams around cyber assets.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: Uh, simplest way to say it is it's hard to defend what you don't know exists.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: And so uh, how do cybersecurity professionals kind of get a feeling of what their attack surface is, not from the outside in, but from the inside out around cyber assets?
4:47
SPEAKER_01: And a cyber asset is anything that has cyber relevance.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: And so that could be anything from an endpoint to a server, to a network, to an application, but on the flip side, it could be a person, a process, the business context.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: So anything that has cyber relevance, understanding kind of all of those assets and being able to actually get a continuous kind of feel for those assets versus kind of static point in time.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: So is that the real challenge?
5:11
SPEAKER_00: Is that you know knowing what happens over time for assets as opposed to what happened yesterday?
5:16
SPEAKER_01: No, actually, I think I think the the biggest challenge is most securities, most security teams, information security teams actually just don't know all of their cyber assets.
5:25
SPEAKER_01: They don't know the attack surface, they don't understand the playing field.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: And so they're doing their best effort to protect what they what they know of.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: It's the things they don't know about that are often exploited.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: They typically end up patching and and maintaining what they know about, it's what they don't know about.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: So it's the the the first problem is is how do I how do I get full visibility on kind of uh on my inventory of cyber assets?
5:49
SPEAKER_01: Uh once you have full visibility, then it's the what's the relationship between those assets and then how do you correlate that based on where your highest risk is?
5:57
SPEAKER_01: And that's usually around your critical processes, your your critical assets.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, those could be you know revenue generating processes, those could be kind of IP-oriented processes.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: And so it's this really kind of interesting progression of just understanding that at first.
6:12
SPEAKER_01: And then once you understand that, what can you go do with that information?
6:15
SPEAKER_01: And how do we, especially if you don't know the relationships between cyber assets, how do you how does a technology allow you to basically unlock that without actually already having to understand, you know, kind of in advance those relationships?
6:29
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's an exciting time, right?
6:31
SPEAKER_00: You're you're getting to build out the go-to-market team across the the world, essentially.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, anytime you do that, you get to build the culture yourself and and uh get the team that you want to go to market with, right?
6:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it's fantastic.
6:45
SPEAKER_01: I had I had uh sold with uh uh Paul Ayers back in PGP days.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: So he's the head of he's the CEO.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: And Paul was running European sales, and I was running North American sales, and then Charlie Howe, who I partnering up with, runs uh the AMIA sales.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: So I'm partnering up with some of the brightest sales minds that I've had a chance to sell with, kind of all back in one company at a very, very early stage.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: It's it's pretty fun.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna take us back in the time machine for today's conversation.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: Back to 2013.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: Ionic Security, based out of Atlanta, had been formed at the same time that we were building out the go-to-market team for Ionic back then.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: Tell us about how you came to know about Ionic and what attracted you.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, I was in a really great position at uh RSA.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: So I was working with the Archer division, and uh it was a it was a technology that was already already had uh market momentum.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: It was really unlocking value for customers, and I wasn't really looking to kind of depart RSA, and that typically seems to be the case in a lot of these.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh my mentor, so back in the fast forward days, I met a uh a really phenomenal person named Steve Abbott, and Steve has become my sales mentor, and he was my sales mentor at Fast Forward, he was my sales mentor and our head of sales at PGP.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: Steve had an opportunity to become CEO of a company called Ionic, and uh basically called up his his group of you know kind of friends to say, hey, let's go build this together.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: And so Steve's through a series of conversations kind of introduced uh me and a couple other folks to kind of what Ionic was to charter, what they were gonna go set off to uh to solve for.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: And so I had a decision to make, which is kind of leave something that's established and and kind of already running and really kind of go into high growth build mode at RSA with Archer, uh, or go to your point, set up my uh my own culture uh in in basically a blank canvas.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: And that really intrigued me actually, this I idea that uh we could take a really compelling value proposition with the technology and then actually go create it from scratch, you know, uh has been something historically that I've really enjoyed doing.
8:50
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I told told Steve that uh that I was in that would help him as his head of sales build out the go-to-market motion there.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think about a year after you joined, then I joined as well, part of our early go-to-market team.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: And what I wanted to do today was you know go back to those days and see what we can kind of pull out as as learnings.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: To to to kind of you know do a spoiler alert.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Ionic was acquired last year by Twilio, you know, for pennies on the dollar.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: So you you can't sit here and say this was a a raging success.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: And and the real question is, well, why?
9:28
SPEAKER_00: What happened along the way that that caused it to be very promising, but not actually ultimately uh realize that promise?
9:36
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we want to uh talk about today.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll I'll introduce one topic for us to talk about, Mike, and that is this whole balancing act between you know having a big vision that uh investors and also employees would want to latch onto and say, yeah, I want to be part of that, versus, well, there's only so much you can do in early stages to deliver.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: And I always felt that there was a little bit of a disconnect there at Ionic.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think if you kind of step back, the the reason that Ionic was so compelling for so many uh uh individuals, and you nailed that the employees that joined, the investors that put money into it, I think the uh partners that uh design partners that went on the journey with us, those early adopters, uh, because it was actually solving um kind of the holy grail of uh information security or cyber issues.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: And that is, you know, if you could make data aware and you could actually, you know, regardless of where the data went, you could actually turn on or off policy around data.
10:37
SPEAKER_01: You start thinking about all the ramifications of that.
10:39
SPEAKER_01: Um you think about things like GDPR and sensitivity of data and being able to, you know, individuals being able to actually determine, you know, how organizations could use their data.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: You start thinking about intellectual property and and hackers and ransomware and threats and your ability to basically say if it's you know you could you could change policy regardless of where that data was because it had to phone home.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: So to your point, Ionic had this incredible vision, and it was really going to be this um um this this almost like DNS for key management, which is um this traffic cop for for data policy.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: And so um everyone that that's been in kind of uh cybersecurity or you know, I kind of grew up in the on the on the encryption side of PGP, realized how powerful and compelling that would be.
11:27
SPEAKER_01: We also knew it was a pretty daunting task because you had data that were um you had unstructured and you had structured data.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, it was hey, do we go tackle all of this at one time?
11:37
SPEAKER_01: Do we try to tackle subsets of this at one time?
11:40
SPEAKER_01: And anytime you're in a uh in a startup, you're basically trying to figure out what are the critical things you need to accomplish to affect the outcome that you ultimately want.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: And the outcome we wanted was we needed the big, three big cloud ecosystems, uh Google, Amazon, and Microsoft Azure, to basically have some of their largest customers say, We want a different key management system to uh affect the data in your ecosystems.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: That could have been tens of thousands of customers, or it could have been 10, 20, 30 of the largest customers with the largest spend in those ecosystems.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: And so we had to make some go-to-market decisions, which is what's gonna actually affect downstream our ability to go actually execute the long-term vision of Ionic.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: And then you have to step back and say, well, how do you start to kind of go execute against that?
12:32
SPEAKER_01: And to your spoiler alert, um, I think we had a huge vision.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: I think we tried to execute on too much uh one time technically.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh we never got we never got to the point where the customers were getting enough value off the platform, but they continued to hang in there because they saw the potential.
12:49
SPEAKER_01: I think investors saw the potential, I think employees saw the potential.
12:52
SPEAKER_01: And so it was this almost always, almost there.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, but but realizing that that it was such a big, um, hairy issue that we were trying to tackle in the marketplace, um, that you uh you almost had to you had to break it down and deconstruct it.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think if I was to go backwards in time to your point and say, what did I learn?
13:11
SPEAKER_01: I think there was a philosophical difference sometimes between the uh the how we were the platform we were building versus what we were building on top of the platform.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: And so do you go after the developer communities or you actually do you go after the enterprise communities?
13:27
SPEAKER_01: And I think there was a there was almost a passion to say, hey, we wanted to be more Splunk-like from an engineering perspective, um, but that product did have to be mature enough that application developers could easily use that product, right?
13:39
SPEAKER_01: And so um so there was a little bit of a disconnect between ultimately how would we become and make Ionic ubiquitous, and so it was it it wasn't owned or controlled by one major kind of uh ecosystem, Azure, Google, uh AWS.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: And so that was complex.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: And so if I look backwards and say, what would I have potentially done differently?
14:00
SPEAKER_01: I've made it, I may have actually shifted our go-to-market instead of the largest enterprises in the world.
14:05
SPEAKER_01: We may have started with smaller application developers and almost made it a toolkit that it could use and it became, it becomes infectious, kind of like Splunk and other technologies have done.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, like Jira did this really well outside of cybersecurity, where um, you know, that application developer community starts to create the fuel and the fire uh around that.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: Um it's always easy to look back and retrospect about what you would have done differently.
14:30
SPEAKER_01: We really felt at the time that these big, large enterprises in lots of big verticals, some of the largest financial services, some of the largest healthcare and insurance companies, some of the largest consulting and systems integrators, they were all involved.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: And it was almost like, hey, these people are so innovative that if we can put the right kind of pressure and we can work together, we can crack this.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: We can crack this uh this holy grail kind of opportunity.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: Um that turned out to mean that we needed to get benefit to those organizations, which means they needed to get technology that actually could unlock small kind of wins for them.
15:07
SPEAKER_01: And that's ultimately where we disconnected is we could never get the technology to the point where when they deployed it, um, they could get enough value to then take us to the next level with them.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, because again, very complex.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: It was desktops, it was browsers, it was unstructured, it was structured data.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: Um, it was it was, and you think about the number of environments that you have to engineer for when you're trying to intersect with all of those, really, really complex.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think that's the that's the thing that I remember as well is that the vision was you imagine uh two planets.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: One is massive, and then stuck on the side of it is is a moon that would be attached to the planet.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: And what was happening was we were developing for and building for the big massive planet.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: But to your point, right, for people that were buying in early, they need to get some sort of value.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: So we were building the moons, the the the use case solutions on the side of it that they were getting a little bit of value for, but it was really dependent on the massive planet working.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: And I'd say the one thing that's different to other platforms is at the end of the day, this data was getting getting encrypted and decrypted.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't like you could just say, well, the big platform is there and it's okay just uh uh but we got a contained use case.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, if that if that data that we encrypted ended up somewhere, it needed to be decrypted under the right the right circumstances.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: So it put a lot of pressure on the you know the big platform that we were developing to say there's no, you know, it doesn't do it, right?
16:36
SPEAKER_00: It has to be able to do it for the CEO on a Tuesday night if they're in uh in Indonesia, right?
16:42
SPEAKER_00: It can't be, well, we haven't quite got that far yet.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: And that was, I think, the thing that kind of held us back a little bit, right?
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Because uh well while we got the visionary uh customers that said, yeah, that's so important.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: Um I I feel I feel like the ramifications of encrypting data were so big that it held things back a little bit, probably, uh, was my recollection.
17:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and you I think you're right.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: I think you and you have to get that right, right?
17:10
SPEAKER_01: There is no in-between with encryption and decryption of data, and you have to get that right in lots of potential uh circumstances.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, that could be data going from a desktop to a browser, that could be, you know, um an email system, it could be accessed through a browser, that could be structured, unstructured data.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: Um it it uh it still excites me today of how close Ionic got to actually solving the problem.
17:33
SPEAKER_01: Um it's uh disappointing that uh that that there ultimately wasn't um a home, and not to say that Twilio isn't the right home, but I think earlier in its evolution that could have added the fuel that we needed to ultimately land it where it could have landed.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: So um, because I think there was always a hesitancy to say if you if you partner with any one ecosystem that could be Azure, that could be AWS, that could be Google, you're only solving a third of the potential problem.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: And now I'm thinking there's an IBM Red Hat you know kind of ecosystem.
18:02
SPEAKER_01: And you know, you if you if only one of those ecosystems actually ever had the kind of key management capabilities, they they would they would have an advantage, but that data, if it ever left that ecosystem, needed to be interacted with.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: And so I think there was this hesitancy to we had to be neutral, we had to be Switzerland in a way, um, to say we we you know for this to ultimately work, we we have to be neutral.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: We can't be we can't be bound to any one of these.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: And while that's super exciting, that actually meant that uh that we had to go try to figure out how to do this all on our own, uh, potentially with some of their help.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: We had great partnership uh relationships with Microsoft and with it with Amazon and with Google.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, but uh but those take years and years to develop.
18:45
SPEAKER_01: And even with some of the largest companies in the world applying pressure on those organizations, they're they're big, they've got their own, you know, kind of solar systems and technology kind of, you know, gravity and and mass that they have to kind of deal with.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: And so um very, very exciting.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I can honestly step back, Andrew, and say I'm super proud of what we accomplished at Ionic.
19:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you would say that would be counterintuitive based on how you when how you uh started this, which is it got sold for pennies on the dollar to Twilio.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: We learned so much and we assembled such an amazing group of humans uh over there that uh and we and if you think about what we were able to accomplish um trying to tackle this holy grail, uh I look back all the time and say, I don't think we failed, I think we succeeded in so many areas that a lot of times uh teams, other teams would have never even got close.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I for me, it was I think probably the first time in my career where I was somewhat somewhere where the mission was so important, right?
19:43
SPEAKER_00: I think up till then I'd always been at companies where I think frankly they played at missions, they played at uh having a big why about what we were doing stuff, why we were doing things.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: Um but Ionic, I mean, once we really got our head around what we were trying to achieve and what the outcome would be if we did that, there was a very good group of very strong people who are very passionate about trying to solve that problem.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't a lack of quality, it wasn't a lack of hard work, it was it was a big, big thing.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, and when I look back and think about that, I think the work, the work that you did and Steve and Adam did about creating the right sort of culture for getting passionate people on board to try and go and solve a big problem was was very impressive.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: Um the other thing, Mike, that was very impressive was you know, without naming names, we built up a uh very, very uh high quality community of design partners, early adopters.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't by accident, right?
20:40
SPEAKER_00: You you put together a program that was much more than just you know give us some feedback once in a while.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: There was a lot more to that, and how we engage with them as well.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: We learnt a lot.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you just kind of explain what what you did and and how that came around?
20:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I think yeah, thanks, Andrew.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I think anytime, anytime you're starting in a new company, every every company's dynamics are gonna be different and and they're good and your go-to-market is gonna be a little bit different.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: And kind of going back to what what I said when I sat down with uh with um Adam and with Steve and you know uh another gentleman, Jeff Sizemore, was critical kind of in the evolution of of Ionic, uh Brian Gilson, so these great minds, really skilled technologists, and um we were kind of looking at it saying there's a couple approaches.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: You could try to go, you know, kind of more medium-sized small companies and try to figure out um how do we get enough kind of mass with those organizations, and then we kind of kind of you know go back go up to the larger enterprises.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: As I said earlier, what we've what we recognized was to affect the ecosystems we needed to, we had to go land the largest companies in the world that had enough spin with those with those cloud ecosystems, the AWS's and the Googles and the and the Azure's that um that that they would potentially take notice.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we we didn't have we we wanted to try to get their attention quickly.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: And so um to do that, that meant that means that meant that we actually had to go back and say, how do we structure a program where we can go land the biggest, most complicated, complex brands in the world as our early adopters, as our first customers in.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: And that's typically inverted.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: Most companies don't do that, they aspire to get those guys over time.
22:19
SPEAKER_01: They don't start there, and so to start there, we actually changed our selling motion.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh, the selling motion was a lot less about let us tell you about what we do, what problems we solve.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: It was a lot more around the philosophical holy.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: Grail that you described and we talked about, which is do we believe the person sitting across from us believes that if we were able to solve this problem, it would be a game changer.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: It would be material, it would change the industry.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: And how do we go find those people?
22:49
SPEAKER_01: And so we actually started the this early adopter program was actually philosophically qualifying in uh really two attributes, which is um, does the person, and we were targeting chief information security officers.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: So they were the visionaries and the owners of the information security visions within these big organizations.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: Did they actually philosophically believe that that cybersecurity starts with data out?
23:14
SPEAKER_01: And that if you could actually go in and and and the holy grail of data was making data aware that data could have policy that could follow it, you know, did they believe that if you were able to do that and you were able to do that successfully, that that would be a game changer?
23:30
SPEAKER_01: And that was that was the holy grail.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: And I would say the same thing was was uh was accurate for the investors that we brought in.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: You know, did they believe that solving this problem would be game changing?
23:40
SPEAKER_01: It would be a multi-billion, you know, tens of billion dollar kind of idea.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: And so what we did is we basically profiled and we started looking for, hey, who are the innovators in the marketplace?
23:51
SPEAKER_01: Uh, who are the movers and shakers?
23:53
SPEAKER_01: Who are the CISOs?
23:54
SPEAKER_01: Who are such big thinkers?
23:56
SPEAKER_01: And we um luckily had some great tier one VCs uh backing us, and and they already had to establish some great rapport with a lot of these innovators.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: And so uh it was really connecting the philosophy of if we were able to solve this, what would it mean for you?
24:11
SPEAKER_01: And the second one is do you work at an organization that has an appetite to take risk on technology early in its maturation if it has the potential to actually be a leapfrog for you or game changing?
24:24
SPEAKER_01: And so we were we were we were philosophically qualifying the person, and then we were also philosophically qualifying the organization and their appetite um to spend money.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, and what's interesting, um, Andrew, is you know, we we designed the program to say to really get involved in this.
24:42
SPEAKER_01: We weren't talking about tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: These organizations were investing millions of dollars with us to go on a journey because they were so passionate about the the problem we were solving.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: And so you you mentioned we built this amazing community.
24:57
SPEAKER_01: We did.
24:57
SPEAKER_01: We built a community where we had very, very passionate customers, very, very passionate partners, investors, um, all getting together, collaborating, saying, if we could, if we could, if we could go uh crack this, this is gonna be game changing.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, our our ask for these uh these uh customers uh was kind of counterintuitive.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: You would actually think a design partner would be like, hey, please work with us.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: It was no, there's only a handful of organizations in the world that probably have the the cajones, the balls, to actually jump in with the technology of our of our um uh maturity to go solve this problem, and that may or may not be you.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: And it was really interesting because the true innovators came forward, and by the way, it's gonna be a multi-million dollar investment to kind of partner with us, and the value is gonna come actually kind of later in the journey versus the very beginning of the journey, but you're gonna be influencing that journey.
25:49
SPEAKER_01: Um, and what we what I found was they were incredible innovators that saw the potential and actually stepped in.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: And they did very unnatural things in their procurement processes, et cetera, because we were so early to actually partner with us to give to go solve the problem.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: And I think the only reason we were able to do that, Andrew, is because the problem was such a big, hairy, audacious goal problem that that they they genuinely wanted to kind of see us succeed.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this was not a slightly better web gateway or a different way to do endpoint, right?
26:21
SPEAKER_00: It was it was completely different.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: And I I remember two things that I was really surprised about early on when you know I was thinking about joining.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: One was that um that these people would spend millions of dollars to be part of this, right?
26:38
SPEAKER_00: I was I was shocked, right, that uh that was you know, I don't know if commonplace, but it you know, this was not out of the ordinary for them to do that.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: They would look for really game-changing security technologies and want to be part of the ecosystem that brought them to market, right?
26:54
SPEAKER_00: So I was I was surprised about that.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: And then secondly, the thing that was idling to me was how many uh CISOs that we talked to were very, very candid about their willingness to uh take on the risk, but also the company appetite for doing it, right?
27:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, I remember having conversations with CISOs where they would be really pretty excited about the whole idea, but then would take themselves out by saying, Look, I uh I'm not a point in my career where I can take this on.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: We're not a point in the program where it makes sense to do this, or they would just say, Yeah, it doesn't matter what I want, the company's never gonna buy you know this sort of stuff from a startup like you guys, right?
27:33
SPEAKER_00: And they would uh select out at that point.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: It was really irony to me that that would happen.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think Andrew, to your point, we did that very, very early in the conversations.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: We didn't we didn't try to kind of delay this.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: This was first second conversation is um is qualifying that in because there's only the only thing that we can control is our time and the time we were spending with some someone on their side.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: Well, we don't want to waste their time or our time.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: And so we had, you know, and I know this is a shock for a lot of people that got into the program uh with us and started kind of from a selling motion, we had those conversations very early.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: And I and I and I think organizations were very appreciative that we we were having this very candid open conversation uh versus trying to subtly position kind of these things.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: No, it was very direct.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: And if they weren't if if the timing wasn't right for them, that was okay.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't it was a it was a it was a humble okay saying that's great, and and it isn't right for a lot of organizations, and a lot of organizations needed to be more mature or more proven, etc.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, and you know, it was very much a hey, we appreciate that.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: Um and what was interesting, Mike, you know, you think about selling motions at uh more mature companies or even frankly early stage companies was you know, there was no need for battle cards, there was no need for positioning things, there was no need for, I don't know, handling all these things because we just had a conversation at a r at a visionary level with people who were either visionary or not, and either willing to engage or not.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: And to your point, I think we handled it very well.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: Where I don't think anyone after our first meeting was under any illusion about the maturity of what we had.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: We would we we don't have a there's nothing to install right now, right?
29:08
SPEAKER_00: We are not at the stage where you want to put this inside your environment.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: So we're very clear about that.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: But also they would uh be very clear about the partnership that we wanted, right?
29:18
SPEAKER_00: We were we were never in the business of convincing or or trying to drag them into seeing our way of doing things, right?
29:25
SPEAKER_00: Uh in a very you know sensible, non-judgmental way.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, we were either aligned or we weren't.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: It really was that simple.
29:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and uh and it's interesting um when you start building a coalition to go solve something that's as meaningful, the mission that you were talking about, Andrew, people want to people want to be part of that.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: And I we started to, as we started to get enough kind of mass of these organizations and these very innovative CISOs, you could tell the next wave wanted to be part of that because they they saw the power that we were kind of uh accumulating in the room that we had and the and the brain power that was being kind of um you know kind of focused on this.
30:02
SPEAKER_01: And and organizations, these are the biggest banks of the world, uh, these are the biggest uh insurance companies of the world, some of the biggest manufacturers in the world.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: We're applying time, resources, effort to help us go solve this.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so it's really it's really amazing what you can do when you've got something to your point that kind of uh galvanizes everyone towards a common mission, a common outcome, a common goal.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I remember, you know, when I was thinking about joining, I just kind of hearing, you know, we're L adopting programs or millions of dollars, and we've got these visionary CISOs.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: And I remember you and I had had dinner one night, and uh I was kind of intrigued by this whole whole thing.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, God, you know, there's really people that spend that sort of money.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: Um and then the next conversation we had was, you know, how do you identify who the innovators are?
30:48
SPEAKER_00: I remember asking you the question, thinking that what was going to come back with some amazing algorithm for you know triangulating eight different points of their their social presence in LinkedIn or wherever and their speeches and where they're at and things like that to figure out is this person gonna be an innovator or not?
31:05
SPEAKER_00: And uh I remember you looking at me like I was crazy, going, no, no, we just asked them.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: And it in many ways it wasn't that simple, right?
31:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, which means we had to have a lot of conversations.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: We had to talk to a lot of people.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, but now you're right.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: It it was that.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, over time as we evolved, we started to create heat maps and we started to look for kind of trends that we saw.
31:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, were there CISOs that are kind of out on the speaking circuits for some of the events?
31:29
SPEAKER_01: Because usually they're very innovative and kind of thought-provoking and you know, and kind of leading leading edge.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: So we started to see indicators out there of, hey, where are these innovators?
31:38
SPEAKER_01: Who, you know, these CISO innovators and what mark, you know, what industries potentially?
31:43
SPEAKER_01: And we started to look for things like, hey, where was there a CISO turnover where a new CISO was coming into an organization and and why were they hired?
31:50
SPEAKER_01: Were they hired to be a a change change agent?
31:53
SPEAKER_01: And if they were hired to be a change agent um and an innovation change agent, then they could be a really interesting kind of profile for us.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: So very early days, it was very much like you said, it was very, hey, let's just ask them.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: Later days, we'd still just ask them, but actually there was a little bit, a little bit of uh kind of science behind uh, hey, how do we try to flush out these innovators, these these folks that would uh be you know, kind of see the potential of kind of what we were all collaborating towards.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: Um it but to your point, it's it's interesting.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes if you keep simple things simple and you you know you just remember there's another person on the other side asking them very very kind of upfront conver uh questions um about what you know about their um attitudes towards things is really illuminating, and I think they really appreciate that.
32:39
SPEAKER_01: Um and we had so many that were excited about what we're doing, timing was off, it wasn't the right time for them, risk appetite wasn't there for the organization, but then we had those gems that were that timing was right, risk appetite was right, and they were so polarized and philosophically aligned to the mission that we were trying to accomplish that you know when all those things lined up, um, it was really magical what they were able to accomplish in in typical, very complex large organizations, complex contractual processes.
33:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, what we were able to actually kind of get through because we had someone who had juice, uh uh you know, an executive that was empowered that said, I'm willing to take the risk, let's let's go, right?
33:18
SPEAKER_01: And so you have you have legal things you'd have to kind of negotiate, but actually they took a lot of business risk um because that was the expectation that we had set to your point kind of up front, which is we need your help doing this, right?
33:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I mean there was multiple uh conversations or or opportunities that we we won as early adultered programs where the procurement team were trying to shut it down because it was early stage, because it was unproven, because it wasn't released and ready to be installed and hadn't been whatever they were needing.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: And the the business uh owner, the CISO would say, no, we're we're moving ahead.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh it was it was good to see that.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: So, Mike, let's let's fast forward.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: So now you're you're building the team at Noetic.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: What are you taking from that experience at Ionic uh that's relevant for how you're viewing the team that you're building?
34:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, hey, great question.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: Um you know, I uh first off, what I realized is I met a uh I met some amazing humans at Ionic, both people that worked within Ionic, and then actually the the partners, the the investors, uh, as well as the um the customers that we sold to, or just even the prospects we were talking to, um, that's actually paying huge dividends here at a company like Noetic because um I've got this phenomenal network of organizations and people that uh that are I know are passionate um and they're passionate about solving problems.
34:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the other things is I realize that if you assemble a really, really great team, you can go do really amazing things.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes timing or technology don't line up.
34:46
SPEAKER_01: Um and that's kind of what happened at Ionic.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: And so uh I'm taking um into Noetic, I'm taking, let's let's build a high-caliber team that knows how to work hard, uh, um understands you know kind of complexities of a startup journey, um, but also just enjoys the journey.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: Um we had so many great experiences at Ionic, um, and we and I learned so much um through all of that um that I've applied it in Corda and I've applied at Ronus, and I've now kind of applied applying here at Noetic.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: Um the other thing that I learned, uh Andrew, is I've done two startups where the startups were actually so innovative that they were almost ahead of the market demand, right?
35:24
SPEAKER_01: The market didn't know they were looking for that.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: And so it's very they're very evangelical cells where you're basically trying to create quadrants, you're trying to create categories.
35:33
SPEAKER_01: With Noetic, I actually wanted to step back and say, I kind of want to go into a space that's a startup that's already emerging and that they're potentially we're not the first ones in.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, because then it's about you know kind of technology and team and execution.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: It was some of the things that I wanted to kind of you know, kind of hone my own craft uh to say I want to go, I want to go build repeatable processes.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: And so in the uh noetics side, um, Gartner's kind of created this category called chasm, which is cyber asset attack surface management.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's this whole notion of you need to know what your cyber assets are to be able to kind of protect them um and understand the relationships there.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm going into a space that's emerging.
36:14
SPEAKER_01: It's still very new.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: I've got I've got competition, I've got healthy competition.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: Um they've already proven that organizations are kind of buying into the problem or spending money on the problem.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: There's probably a couple hundred organizations that have kind of invested in this space so far.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: Um and so it's really, really I wanted to change a pace.
36:32
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to go into an organization where I know that the market need has been identified, and now it's about building a great team, um trying to understand and kind of uh listen, iterate, kind of unlock the repeatability and the motions and outsell my competition um and uh build it build a better system.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: Um and I can still do that from kind of scratch here at Noetic because I have a blank canvas.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: And so I think what I'm finding is assemble the right team, understand is is it the right timing in the marketplace?
37:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think we've got great timing, we're getting great validation from people we're talking to about timing in the marketplace.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then it's technology.
37:10
SPEAKER_01: Can't do I have technology and do I have an engineering team that can actually build this in a way that uh we can go unlock it and and uh unlock it in a kind of more elegant way than than our competition and give me some some differentiation.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh and I think I have all three of those here.
37:26
SPEAKER_01: And so, and I've got a uh really experienced go-to-market team, and we've got an extremely experienced engineering team.
37:32
SPEAKER_01: That's engineering team at Noetic is kind of built up and and sold multiple kind of technologies uh prior.
37:39
SPEAKER_01: So I think we've got the right DNA, um, which is kind of what I was looking for.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: If I was gonna go back into a startup in a series A again, this is the DNA I was looking for, um, which is you know all these different components and a lot of really great alignment and very, very little egos.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, so all of that is is kind of present here at Noetic.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's gonna be a really fun ride.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: And as you're thinking about building the team, where are you starting?
38:04
SPEAKER_00: What sort of roles are you filling?
38:06
SPEAKER_00: Uh what sort of achievements are you you trying to get to in the first year or two?
38:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great question.
38:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we're doing something a little bit different.
38:13
SPEAKER_01: We're starting uh in a series A, you typically start in North America, you build up some a center of mass, and then you kind of expand into the UK into Europe.
38:22
SPEAKER_01: Um, we're actually doing something different.
38:23
SPEAKER_01: We're actually starting our selling motions in both uh um Europe and in uh in North America.
38:29
SPEAKER_01: Um and so that means that we've got a we've got pods.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: We have a uh sales rep, a sales engineer, and we have actually a sales manager.
38:38
SPEAKER_01: So we've got two pods, one in the US, so we've got one in uh one in Europe.
38:42
SPEAKER_01: Um so 2022 is all about landing our first 20 customers or or so, right?
38:47
SPEAKER_01: So um we're gonna break that into kind of first half, second half goals.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: And it's really to understand, uh, and we built actually an early adopter program here.
38:55
SPEAKER_01: It's a different dynamic, it's a different type of program, but it's also uh asking organizations to go on a uh design partnership journey with us.
39:03
SPEAKER_01: Um and so it's getting those organizations kind of landed, not just from a sales perspective and a PO in the door, but actually how do we get them to value and to success on the technology quickly?
39:13
SPEAKER_01: Um and it's us us kind of understanding that process.
39:17
SPEAKER_01: And as we better understand that process, that will help us actually understand how to actually make that process more efficient across the selling motions as well as kind of the delivery motion.
39:26
SPEAKER_01: So this year is very much about uh listen, learn, iterate.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we've set some really lofty goals for ourselves from a revenue perspective and from a customer account perspective.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, but the validation we're getting in the marketplace of people nodding their heads saying this is this is um amazing and this is absolutely a foundational component to any kind of cyber cyber program has been really amazing.
39:48
SPEAKER_01: And so uh so I think we're gonna be able to move potentially even faster than we anticipated.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: And is the CASA market a mid-market market or an enterprise market, or where does it fit in best?
39:59
SPEAKER_01: It's both, actually.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: And so I would say, you know, um any any organization that's large enough that they they could be under attack from uh ransomware or some from from a cyber attack is a good target.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: I'd say you need you need to have enough cyber assets under management that it's complex enough to manage them.
40:16
SPEAKER_01: Um and so I would say kind of medium-sized enterprises and larger, obviously, the larger you get, the more complex in the in the larger number of assets.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: Um and so we're we're talking to medium to kind of uh the largest enterprises.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: The largest enterprises we'd be looking at kind of start points that wouldn't be enterprise wide, they'd be kind of start points, um, you know, where we kind of go build design wins with them uh and build credibility and trust.
40:40
SPEAKER_01: Um and so, but we're not shying away from those organizations because they they actually, if anybody, they've got more of this problem than anybody else.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's just very, very complex.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, so um, but I think I think the sweet spot, I think the easiest selling motion is actually gonna be and where organizations um don't have so many uh humans that they can throw at some of these things would be medium-sized organizations where where you know automation and tools and efficiency, they don't have the ability to hire a whole bunch of people to kind of try to run these things, cyber assets and spreadsheets.
41:11
SPEAKER_01: Um I think that's gonna be where the the easier selling motions will be and and there'll be a little bit less complexity.
41:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
41:18
SPEAKER_00: Let me just cut in, Mike.
41:19
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41:24
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41:55
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41:58
SPEAKER_00: Mike, I'm gonna change up the tone here a little bit.
42:01
SPEAKER_00: There is no better way to find out about the real Mike Rogers than by using one of these bullshit LinkedIn polls that is that they're out there right now.
42:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna pull up two here for you.
42:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh first one from Chris Anderson.
42:14
SPEAKER_00: What do you miss most from your analog pre-cell phone childhood or young adulthood?
42:20
SPEAKER_00: Is it A, the mental freedom, B, anonymity, C being okay with being bored, or D something else?
42:30
SPEAKER_01: Probably the mental freedom.
42:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just the the lack of responsibility and the ability to kind of just go do whatever and and not have a care in the world.
42:38
SPEAKER_01: That that'd be my answer.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, and that's uh the poll result.
42:42
SPEAKER_00: 58% agreed with you.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: Next one was 23% said they missed being okay with being bored.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: So I I think you're right.
42:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that all was on focus around it, I guess, is what captures your mind, right?
42:55
SPEAKER_00: I often wonder how much more productive we'd be if we truly had the ability to shut off more often.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: Next one for you is what brands of coffee do you usually buy?
43:05
SPEAKER_00: Are you Dunkin' Donuts, Pete's, Starbucks, or something else?
43:09
SPEAKER_01: My daughter is a barista at this awesome little kind of specialty coffee shop, and she's got to be spoiled.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: So it's uh, you know, here in Allen, Texas, it's armor coffee all the way.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh I've I've been spoiled.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: I have a hard time going back to Starbucks or Dunkin' or anything else.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: So Yeah, these little so many of these little roasters around the country.
43:30
SPEAKER_00: I was uh just a quick aside, uh um up in Crested Buton here in Colorado at the weekend, this small little roasting place in Gunnison.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: And they ship all around the U.S.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: as well.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: They had to build these shipping boxes, and it was like a like a coffee shop with a little cafe, and then they've got this roasting operation as well.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh uh fantastic when you get these little um micro roastery phrase.
43:53
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, but uh it is not.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, I'm with you.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: So good.
43:58
SPEAKER_00: Final question for you, Mike.
43:59
SPEAKER_00: Is there a sales question or a sales saying that you just hate and that you wish to cast off into the further reaches of space, never to be uttered again by anyone in a sales environment?
44:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:14
SPEAKER_01: Do you have any questions?
44:16
SPEAKER_01: I hate that question.
44:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, in the demonstration or whatever else, tell me more.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: Most times no one has a question.
44:30
SPEAKER_01: So there's no context.
44:32
SPEAKER_01: It's not, hey, how do you do this?
44:33
SPEAKER_01: You don't stop on a bullet point.
44:34
SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's the so the one I would love to get rid of is do you have any questions?
44:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's the easiest one to say because at the end of something you want to know, do they have questions?
44:44
SPEAKER_01: But when you ask that question, no one ever has questions.
44:47
SPEAKER_00: So um I'll tell you, uh, I I see this all the time.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: So you go and look at the gong or chorus call recordings, and you see, you know, here's when the presentation starts or the demo, whatever it might be.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: And then you look for the tiniest slivers of the prospect actually talking.
45:04
SPEAKER_00: And I guarantee you, the 98% of the time before that, the question that I asked was, Does this make sense?
45:09
SPEAKER_00: Do you have any questions?
45:11
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
45:11
SPEAKER_01: Those are those are the two.
45:12
SPEAKER_01: Does this make sense?
45:13
SPEAKER_01: Any questions?
45:14
SPEAKER_01: And you know, and and I've used those myself because they just become easy uh space fillers, you know, but it's so much easier to kind of try to bring back to relevance of like, hey, how are you doing this today?
45:25
SPEAKER_01: Or, you know, it just so many other ways you could do that.
45:28
SPEAKER_01: And I I think it's a trap that a lot of people fall into.
45:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, those would be the ones I would love to get rid of.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I I coach people on on two two types of questions in that situation.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: One is ones that look at what they're doing right now.
45:40
SPEAKER_00: So it is how does this compare to how things are working for you right now, something like that.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: And the second one I probably learned from you, which is the impact question.
45:49
SPEAKER_00: If you had this in the future, what impact would it have on your program, your capability, the problems we talked about, the industry, whatever it might be?
45:57
SPEAKER_00: And then you get a much more thoughtful answer going one of those two different directions right there.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that too, because it's almost the utopia, which is if you can make this work at however you'd want it to work, what would it look like, right?
46:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, that that whole impact and kind of the the magical kind of you know unicorn kind of state of if you could write it and make it look, you know, kind of however you want it to look.
46:16
SPEAKER_01: I I think both those are really because it gets it gets people talking, it gets it gets it makes it relevant.
46:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, it brings them back into hey, what pain is this causing me today, or challenges or complexity that it gets them back to that state of mind of wow, if I did solve for this, man, that would that would actually change X, Y, or Z.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: So I think you're spot on.
46:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:36
SPEAKER_00: And then finally, Mike, if someone wants to get hold of you and talk about Noetic and the opportunities that you have, what's the best way to get hold of you?
46:42
SPEAKER_01: Feel free to kind of reach out to me.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: Uh, email is m Rogers.
46:45
SPEAKER_01: So M for Michael Rogers, R-O-G-E-R-S at noeticcyber.com.
46:50
SPEAKER_01: Or you can actually find me on LinkedIn at the Mike Rogers.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: Very good.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, Mike, it was great to catch up, talk about some uh common experiences back in the day, and wish you all the best with Noetic this year.
47:01
SPEAKER_01: Now thanks, Andrew.
47:02
SPEAKER_01: Really fun.